Book picks similar to
The Organic Backyard Vineyard: A Step-by-Step Guide to Growing Your Own Grapes by Tom Powers
gardening
homesteading
cookbooks
grape-growing
Apple Cider Vinegar For Health: 100 Amazing and Unexpected Uses for Apple Cider Vinegar
Britt Brandon - 2014
Apple Cider Vinegar for Health shows you how to use the all-natural product in your daily beauty and health routine, from crafting a wholesome weight-loss tonic to giving your skin a lovely glow. Featuring step-by-step instructions and plenty of helpful tips, this book provides 100 apple cider vinegar solutions that help:
Control cholesterol and boost weight loss.
Relieve daily aches and pains, from muscle soreness to chronic headaches.
Treat unsightly blemishes, itchy insect bites, and sunburns.
Promote healthy skin, hair, and nails.
There's almost nothing vinegar can't handle--from frizzy hair, to hiccups, to varicose veins--and all without the need for dangerous chemicals or costly procedures. With Apple Cider Vinegar for Health, you'll discover all the benefits that a simple bottle of ACV can bring.
Homesweet Homegrown: How to Grow, Make, And Store Food, No Matter Where You Live
Robyn Jasko - 2012
Jasko and Biggs are committed to turning you into a healthy, happy farmer even if you live in a big city high-rise. Built around eight comprehensive sections (Know, Start, Grow, Plant, Plan, Make, Eat, and Store), this wonderful 128-page guide walks you through all the steps of successfully nurturing a crop of delicious, healthy vegetables. Everyone from the base beginner to the seasoned farmhand will find something for them in these pages. (The recipe section alone is enough to keep you comin' back to this gem for years!) Narrated in a friendly, helpful tone by Jasko and buoyed by Biggs's great illustrations, this book is the definition of awesomely useful. Super, super, SUPER inspiring. Grow your own everything!
Practical Permaculture: for Home Landscapes, Your Community, and the Whole Earth
Jessi Bloom - 2015
Bring it on!” —Permaculture Magazine Permaculture is more popular than ever, but it can still be a daunting concept. If you are new to permaculture and interested in learning more, Practical Permaculture offers authoritative, in-depth, and hands-on advice for a more holistic approach to sustainable living. Jessi Bloom and Dave Boehnlein, two dynamic leaders in the permaculture community, explain the basics of permaculture, share their design process, and explore various permaculture systems including soil, water, waste, energy, shelter, food and plants, and animals and wildlife. They also profile the fifty most useful plants for permaculture landscapes.
The Resilient Farm and Homestead: An Innovative Permaculture and Whole Systems Design Approach
Ben Falk - 2013
The site is a terraced paradise on a hillside in Vermont that would otherwise be overlooked by conventional farmers as unworthy farmland. Falk's wide array of fruit trees, rice paddies(relatively unheard of in the Northeast), ducks, nuts, and earth-inspired buildings is a hopeful image for the future of regenerative agriculture and modern homesteading.The book covers nearly every strategy Falk and his team have been testing at the Whole Systems Research Farm over the past decade, as well as experiments from other sites Falk has designed through his off-farm consulting business. The book includes detailed information on earthworks; gravity-fed water systems; species composition; the site-design process; site management; fuelwood hedge production and processing; human health and nutrient-dense production strategies; rapid topsoil formation and remineralization; agroforestry/silvopasture/grazing; ecosystem services, especially regarding flood mitigation; fertility management; human labor and social-systems aspects; tools/equipment/appropriate technology; and much more, complete with gorgeous photography and detailed design drawings."The Resilient Homestead" is more than just a book of tricks and techniques for regenerative site development, but offers actual working results in living within complex farm-ecosystems based on research from the "great thinkers" in permaculture, and presents a viable home-scale model for an intentional food-producing ecosystem in cold climates, and beyond. Inspiring to would-be homesteaders everywhere, but especially for those who find themselves with "unlikely" farming land, Falk is an inspiration in what can be done by imitating natural systems, and making the most of what we have by re-imagining what's possible. A gorgeous case study for the homestead of the future.
Cook Yourself Thin: The Delicious Way to Drop a Dress Size
Harry Eastwood - 2007
It’s time to throw out those ready meals, step away from the microwave and discover how to cut calories without compromising on taste. The Cook Yourself Thin team don’t do denial or sums or regimes, but whether you want to lose a few inches, a few pounds, or stay in shape, they’ve got tips and tricks and 80 delicious recipes up their sleeves to make it easy. Simply discover the foods that are your downfall, swap for fantastic skinny alternatives and watch the pounds drop off. Never has dieting been so easy or tasted so good!
Garden Anywhere: How to grow gorgeous container gardens, herb gardens, kitchen gardens, and more, without spending a fortune
Alys Fowler - 2009
Garden Anywhere shows how anyone can create an oasis in the smallest of spaces. We're not talking just a simple pot of marigolds, here. Garden Anywhere outlines everything an aspiring gardener needs to know to sow a bounteous, thriving garden. Alys Fowler, trained at the New York Botanical Garden, guides readers through the process from the ground up—from planning the garden to composting, pruning, harvesting, and propagating. Stylish photos illustrate the how-tos while Alys shares tips on creating gorgeous container gardens, herb gardens, kitchen gardens and more, without spending a fortune.
Brew Ware: How to Find, Adapt Build Homebrewing Equipment
Karl F. Lutzen - 1996
Karl E. Lutzen and Mark Stevens guide you through the best tools for all your brewing needs, from DIY homemade versions of commercial brewery equipment to simple devices that make brewing easier and safer. Learn which gadgets and gizmos work best for measuring, mashing, bottling, kegging, and more. With the proper tools close at hand you’ll save both time and money, leaving you free to focus on enjoying your homebrewed beers.
The Foxfire Book: Hog Dressing; Log Cabin Building; Mountain Crafts and Foods; Planting by the Signs; Snake Lore, Hunting Tales, Faith Healing
Eliot Wigginton - 1972
This is the original book compilation of Foxfire material which introduces Aunt Arie and her contemporaries and includes log cabin building, hog dressing, snake lore, mountain crafts and food, and "other affairs of plain living."
Harvest: An Adventure into the Heart of America's Family Farms
Richard Horan - 2012
This is a timely and important book.”—Ted Morgan, author of Wilderness at Dawn“A lively visit with the dauntless men and women who operate America’s family farms and help provide our miraculous annual bounty. Richard Horan writes with energy and passion.”—Hannah Nordhaus, author of The Beekeeper’s Lament“Horan’s new book evocatively describes the peril and promise of family farms in America. I loved joining him on this journey, and so will you.”—T.A. Barron, author of The Great Tree of AvalonIn Seeds, novelist and nature writer Richard Horan sought out the trees that inspired the work of great American writers like Faulkner, Kerouac, Welty, Wharton, and Harper Lee. In Harvest, Horan embarks upon a serendipitous journey across America to work the harvests of more than a dozen essential or unusual food crops—and, in the process, forms powerful connections with the farmers, the soil, and the seasons.
The Art of Natural Cheesemaking: Using Traditional, Non-Industrial Methods and Raw Ingredients to Make the World's Best Cheeses
David Asher - 2015
For though bread baking has its sourdough, brewing its lambic ales, and pickling its wild fermentation, standard Western cheesemaking practice today is decidedly unnatural. In The Art of Natural Cheesemaking, David Asher practices and preaches a traditional, but increasingly countercultural, way of making cheese—one that is natural and intuitive, grounded in ecological principles and biological science.This book encourages home and small-scale commercial cheesemakers to take a different approach by showing them:• How to source good milk, including raw milk;• How to keep their own bacterial starter cultures and fungal ripening cultures;• How make their own rennet—and how to make good cheese without it;• How to avoid the use of plastic equipment and chemical additives; and• How to use appropriate technologies.Introductory chapters explore and explain the basic elements of cheese: milk, cultures, rennet, salt, tools, and the cheese cave. The fourteen chapters that follow each examine a particular class of cheese, from kefir and paneer to washed-rind and alpine styles, offering specific recipes and handling advice. The techniques presented are direct and thorough, fully illustrated with hand-drawn diagrams and triptych photos that show the transformation of cheeses in a comparative and dynamic fashion.The Art of Natural Cheesemaking is the first cheesemaking book to take a political stance against Big Dairy and to criticize both standard industrial and artisanal cheesemaking practices. It promotes the use of ethical animal rennet and protests the use of laboratory-grown freeze-dried cultures. It also explores how GMO technology is creeping into our cheese and the steps we can take to stop it.This book sounds a clarion call to cheesemakers to adopt more natural, sustainable practices. It may well change the way we look at cheese, and how we make it ourselves.
Great Garden Companions: A Companion-Planting System for a Beautiful, Chemical-Free Vegetable Garden
Sally Jean Cunningham - 1998
Let master gardener Sally Jean Cunningham show you how to keep pests and diseases at bay with her unique companion-gardening system. By planting special combinations of vegetables, flowers, and herbs, you can minimize pest and disease problems and create a high-yielding, beautiful garden!
The Forager's Harvest: A Guide to Identifying, Harvesting, and Preparing Edible Wild Plants
Samuel Thayer - 2006
A guide to 32 of the best and most common edible wild plants in North America, with detailed information on how to identify them, where they are found, how and when they are harvested, which parts are used, how they are prepared, as well as their culinary use, ecology, conservation, and cultural history.
Second Nature: A Gardener's Education
Michael Pollan - 1991
A new literary classic, Second Nature has become a manifesto not just for gardeners but for environmentalists everywhere. "As delicious a meditation on one man's relationships with the Earth as any you are likely to come upon" (The New York Times Book Review), Second Nature captures the rhythms of our everyday engagement with the outdoors in all its glory and exasperation. With chapters ranging from a reconsideration of the Great American Lawn, a dispatch from one man's war with a woodchuck, to an essay about the sexual politics of roses, Pollan has created a passionate and eloquent argument for reconceiving our relationship with nature.
Worldwide Ward Cookbook: 440 Recipes from LDS Cooks Around the Globe
Deanna Buxton - 2009
With comfort-food recipes gathered from across America as well as 46 other countries, you'll find homemade classics along with dishes that may be difficult to pronounce, but are easy to enjoy. And nearly all 440 of these simple and economical recipes are made from ingredients available in most local groceries, so you can delight your family and friends again and again. As you turn the more than 340 pages of this charming book, you'll discover recipes for real food cooked by real people around the globedishes for every occasion and every taste. Enjoy a traditional British Sunday dinner, or delight your family and friends with a delicious Finnish glass cake. You may even want to whip up a batch of Brigham Young's favorite buttermilk donuts. You'll find savory soups to sweet treats, creamy casseroles, entrées with a little bit of kick, and dishes that younger taste buds will like. But perhaps your favorite part of this delightful book will be the stories behind the recipessnippets that will bring a smile, and maybe even inspire you to start a few new traditions. So pull out the pans, fire up the stove, and create some new favorites with the abundance of appetizing ideas found in your Worldwide Ward Cookbook. 9.5" X 11", 342 pages ISBN 978-1-59811-779-0
The Complete Guide to Making Mead: The Ingredients, Equipment, Processes, and Recipes for Crafting Honey Wine
Steve Piatz - 2014
Whatever the truth, brewers have brought this beverage into the twenty-first century, and you can rest assured that The Complete Guide to Making Mead is a thoroughly up-to-date, modern, and authoritative guide to homemade mead. Best of all, it has something for everyone, from the stone-cold beginner to the seasoned veteran. Award-winning mead-maker Steve Piatz begins with a brief history of the fermented beverage; a rundown of the various types of mead; and a discussion of the many types of honey that are available, their characteristics, and where to source them. Readers will be treated to discussions of yeast and special ingredients, as well as what equipment is necessary and reccomended and an illustrated and detailed look at the basic process. Readers will also discover advanced techniques, such as oaking, clarifying, aging, spicing, and blending. There are even sections on developing recipes and troubleshooting problems with the brewing process.With more than 100 color photos, The Complete Guide to Making Mead includes dozens of recipes for basic meads (honey only), melomels (honey and fruit), metheglins (honey and spices), and braggots (honey and malt).